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Dyslexia
The many faces
'Dyslexia' comes from the Greek language, meaning 'difficulty with words', and it affects more of us than you might think.
According to the British Dyslexia Association, some 10% of us suffer from dyslexia to varying degrees, with around 4% of the UK population severely dyslexic.
What is dyslexia?
The Dyslexia Institute define dyslexia as causing difficulties in learning to read, write and spell. Short-term memory, mathematics, concentration and personal organisation may be affected.
Biological in origin, it tends to run in families, but environmental factors also contribute. It usually arises from a weakness in the processing of language-based information.
Dyslexia can occur at any level of intellectual ability. It is not the result of poor motivation, emotional disturbance, sensory impairment or lack of opportunities, but it may occur alongside any of these.
What are the signs?
Dyslexia may not be recognised at school as a child can develop effective coping or avoidance tactics, and equally their intelligence may mask their disability.
The signs can include:
- poor auditory and/or visual memory
- difficulties with reading, and poor spelling and handwriting
- confusion about left and right
- difficulties with mathematics
- poor comprehension skills
- poor short-term memory
- difficulties taking notes or copying from the blackboard
- difficulty pronouncing long words
- difficulties taking a telephone message
- a fear of reading aloud or a dislike for reading and writing.
What causes it?
Genetics is recognised as a significant factor, and if one parent is dyslexic, there is a 50% chance that any of their children may also be dyslexic.
Recent studies using brain imaging techniques show that children with dyslexia may process
certain information in a different part of the brain to the rest of us.
This may be because the nerve systems that are essential to our learning abilities have not fully formed, so less effective areas of the brain get involved instead, causing a higher risk of error with simple tasks, such as reading a word.
Also many dyslexics have difficulty remembering words that they have seen or written several times, so they have to be processed all over again as if they were new words.
What does it mean?
As well as affecting a child's education, dyslexia and dyscalculia (serious difficulty with numbers) often undermine self-confidence and motivation, which has knock-on effects, such as anxiety and behavioural problems.
However, many people with these problems achieve great success in higher education and in life.
Source: Tesco magazine March 2005
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